MW: well, I don't know, exactly. If you mean what part makes me cry, it's really that whole section about piecing back together the body of Truth. And so in part I think it's that image, as a metaphor for the scholarly life, that gets to me--the simultaneous necessity and futility of our attempts to recover or fully understand the past.

And that's a nice answer, for an academic, but that's not all it is. I actually started crying reading passages of the divorce tracts last week, and I think for the same reason: there's just something about Milton's seeming sense of absolute conviction--his utopianism, and his belief that people are fully rational beings who, once they have the "facts" presented to them, will immediately and joyfully change their ways--that I find profoundly moving.